Category: consumer whore

Taking the plunge

1.  So I just received the confirmation email that says I’ve officially signed up for NaNoWriMo, which is something I’ve been thinking about doing for years.  I don’t have any particular idea in mind, and November is also the busiest time of year in terms of AAA videogames, so who knows how this is going to work out, but that’s not even the point – if I can’t carve out an hour of writing time every day, then I have no business calling myself a writer.

I had an idea for a novel a few years ago, and I took a writing class to help develop and flesh it out, but I couldn’t quite figure out what I wanted to do with it, and it ended up withering on the vine.  I’m not sure I want to attempt to resurrect it for NaNo, either; I know myself all too well, and if I got frustrated with reviving it, I’d give up entirely.  I’m also staying away from Scrivener, even though I’m dying to use it; Scrivener seems to be a useful tool when you already have a plot and characters and scenes in mind, and it’s also useful if you already know how to use it without having to hunt and peck.  And I haven’t turned my Macbook on since I updated to Yosemite, so I have no idea if Scrivener is even working at the moment.  In any event, I’m determined to not let technical difficulties get in the way, so I’m keeping it simple and sticking to GoogleDocs on my home/work PCs.

I suppose there’s a part of me that’s annoyed that it takes something like NaNo for me to get off my ass, but there’s another part of me that’s well aware that this is why NaNo exists in the first place, and so I’m going to try not to beat myself up about it too much.

2.  I am now into the third and final book of the Southern Reach Trilogy, which I am enjoying quite a bit; it’s a very quick read, and makes for an entertaining come-down after the lofty heights of The Bone Clocks.  The second book (“Authority”) wasn’t quite as well-written or as absorbing as the first (“Annihilation”), but the third (“Acceptance”) is immediately gripping and seems to be on much firmer ground, which bodes well.

After I finish this one, I’m not quite sure what I’ll read next.  I still have a hefty backlog to get caught up on, for one thing, and I’m also considering giving the uncut version of The Stand a re-read after polling my Facebook friends on their preferred Stephen King novel – specifically asking between The Stand and It.  “It” was always my favorite, whereas “The Stand” never quite hooked me; I’m willing to give it another shot, though.

Hell, I might as well open up the floor here:

3.  I recently received a preview code for The Talos Principle, a first-person puzzle game from Croteam.  I’m about 2 hours into it so far; I’m enjoying it, despite some odd tonal dissonance and puzzle repetitiveness.  I’m not quite sure what I’m allowed to say about it – I don’t often receive preview codes – but I will say that it’s certainly a refreshing change of pace after the suffocating tension of Alien Isolation.

4.  I’m having trouble finding the Sunset Overdrive Xbox One bundle at the discounted price, but Amazon has already started accepting pre-orders at the new price for their Assassin’s Creed Unity bundle (which also includes ACIV at no extra charge).  I’ve already ordered the digital version of ACU for the PS4, but given that Ubisoft’s already made it very clear that they’re aiming for graphical parity between PS4 and XBO, I can’t help but wonder if I should cancel the PS4 pre-order and get this bundle instead.

5.  I’m not much of a drinker these days, but I’ve developed a fondness for spiced rum, which is quite nice for sipping during a cool autumn evening.  I’m not sure why I felt compelled to bring that up, but it’s too late now.

Weekend Recap: foliage

1.  We were away for a wedding this weekend, and so there isn’t much going on in the way of SFTC-relevant posting.  But I must reiterate how wonderful it is to be away from the internet these days.  No hashtags, no doxxing, no bullshit; just a few beautiful autumn days with good friends, free of day job worries and parental responsibilities.

2.  I’ve been down on the Xbox One a lot on this blog, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want one; even though I’m really happy with my PS4, I’m still an Xbox fanboy at heart, and I’ve been hoping for something to push me over the edge (and being able to import all of my Pinball FX2 tables from the 360, while much appreciated, wasn’t quite enough.)  As it happens, Microsoft’s finally delivered the one-two punch I needed:  both Sunset Overdrive and Forza Horizon 2 have been getting good-to-great reviews, and now Microsoft has announced a temporary $50 price cut starting this weekend.  Would it surprise you to learn, then, that all of my dreams last night were about buying an Xbox One?

3.  So last week I said I’d been debating putting Alien Isolation down, and last night I finally made the decision to pull the plug.  I think I’m about halfway through it; I’m currently in the level where I’m trying to access the APOLLO core, and I had to turn in all my weaponry, and all the Working Joes are immune to EMP mines.  The “turn in all your weapons” trope felt a little contrived, frankly, and progressing through the level was becoming more frustrating than anything else, and I don’t particularly care about the game’s fiction to keep butting my head against the wall.  I’ve kept my save file just in case I get the itch to finish it down the road, but I sent the disc back to GameFly and, for the moment, I’m considering myself done with it.

4.  This means that, barring a spontaneous Xbox One purchase this weekend, I’ve got a little bit of time to try and get back into Shadow of Mordor before this year’s final 3 AAA GOTY contenders arrive in November (i.e., Assassin’s Creed Unity (or “AssUnit”), Far Cry 4, and Dragon Age Inquisition).  It’s been so long since I last tried playing it that I might as well start over from scratch – I don’t think I was that far into it, and hopefully I’ll now have an easier time figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do.

5.  I didn’t quite know what to read after getting turned upside down by The Bone Clocks last week; I’d started reading John Le Carre’s A Perfect Spy but that’s not exactly a palate cleanser.  So, instead, I started Annihilation, the first book in the “Southern Reach trilogy” by Jeff VanderMeer.  And that was, in fact, the correct choice.  Each book in the trilogy is incredibly short (at least when compared to everything else I’ve been reading lately); I think it only took me 2 days to finish that first book (and I had a busy weekend).  I’m now 3 chapters into the 2nd book, Authority, and I’m hooked.

Poor Impulse Control: a continuing series

Longtime readers of this blog should know that there’s a “consumer whore” category here for a reason; newcomers can probably figure it out.  I bring this up because, in a moment of weakness (borne out of confusion, which I’ll get to in a second), I accidentally-on-purpose bought and downloaded Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes last night.

(The confusion:  remember, earlier this week, I’d mentioned that PSN was having this thing where if you spent $60, you got $10 in credit?  Well, I’d spent my $60, but didn’t know where the credit was, and so I put MGS:GZ in my cart to see if it would show up… and, well, it didn’t.)

I played MGS for around 10 minutes (or, roughly half the game – HAHA, LOL) and then called it a night.  Honestly, before I deliver any sort of impression, I need to mess around with the control scheme a bit – the default scheme feels incredibly strange and weird and bizarrely unintuitive, and I seem to recall hearing that there’s a different setting that’s more in tune with what the vast majority of 3rd person action games use; if that’s the case, then I’ll get around to checking it out.  And the thing is, even though I’ve sworn up and down that Metal Gear is the most overrated franchise in the history of any and all media, there’s a part of me that’s genuinely curious to check this one out.  Everyone’s complained about the alleged length of the campaign, but there’s supposedly a ton of replay value – alternate side missions and objectives and self-imposed playstyles and such, and most reviewers say that they’ve clocked in at least an extra dozen hours or so after beating the main campaign.  So that’s OK, as far as I’m concerned.

I also was able to download and install Infamous Second Son this morning before leaving for work, although I didn’t get a chance to play anything beyond the very first cutscene.  As this is the first true “next-gen” game that I’ve actually been excited about, I’m hoping to give it a thorough examination over the weekend.

The wife and I will be running errands this weekend and while we’re out I’m also possibly going to pick up this PS4 Gold Wireless Stereo Headset, since I like my surround sound but don’t actually have a surround sound system.  I am also very tempted to check out a Vita.  Yes, I’ve seen that a few brick-and-mortar stores are selling the Xbox One – including the Titanfall bundle – for $450, but I’m still not needing an XBO just yet, and Titanfall isn’t going to be the game to change my mind.  But the Vita is looking more and more like a thing I’m going to need.  Being able to play those new Oddworld remasters on the go feels very necessary; and I’ve got a bunch of PS1 games on my PS3 that I would like to actually play, too.  (Plus – my PS3 is not in an ideal gaming environment at the moment, and I’m really hoping to check out those FFX HD remasters.)  So, please, whatever you do – don’t tell my wife.

The First Few Hours: the new Lara, the new-ish XCOM

cw

So on Tuesday, I spent $60 to digitally download Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition for my PS4.  As I’ve already played and beaten this game (to 100% completion) twice already on the PC, I was a bit apprehensive about why I had to buy it; if I’d only been willing to wait a few more days, I’d have received a rental copy early next week.

There are three reasons why I succumbed, as it turns out.  The first reason, as always, is that I am a consumer whore, and I cannot resist the temptation of instant gratification.  (Even if “instant gratification” in this particular case means waiting over an hour for the download to finish, and then (because the game is still familiar) playing through the beginning so quickly that I caught up with the download progress and had to turn it off for the night.)

The second reason is that, like most PS4 owners, I really, really want to play games on it.  Even if it’s a game that I’ve already played before where the only real difference is a number of substantial graphical improvements.  (Exhibit A:  Assassin’s Creed 4.)

The third and final reason is, perhaps, guilt?  Square-Enix came right out and called the original release a “failure”, even as it sold 3.5 million copies in its first month.  As I was already a Tomb Raider fan, and as I was also a big big fan of this reboot, I felt compelled to at least offer my support – again – in getting a sequel made.  I don’t know what else I can do, Square-Enix.

In any event:  I bought it, and I’ve played through a few hours of it, and for the most part I can say that I’m happy I bought it, even as the graphical enhancements are not as eye-popping as I’d hoped.

This is not to say it looks bad, of course.  I never played the original version on console, but on my PC it looked quite nice, and this enhanced version on the PS4 generally looks phenomenally better.  Most everything looks sharp and crisp and finely detailed; forests actually feel dense and, well, forest-y, with swaying foliage and trees and mists; Lara’s face is far more expressive and realistic.

Still, there’s some weirdness here and there.  In that opening gameplay sequence, where Lara is suspended upside down, the much-vaunted TressFX has her ponytail hanging upside down, but her bangs remain right-side up; when Lara crouches in crawlspaces with her torch, the fire against the roof is still a 2D sprite; when Lara moves through water, the water still ripples oddly and unconvincingly; the deer that you hunt still look… weird.  These are very small nitpicks, to be sure, but the whole point of this “Definitive Edition” was that the graphics were redone, and as I’ve already played the hell out of this game I can’t help but look at the small stuff this time around.

The game is still great, I’m happy to say, and I’m also still impressed by the PS4 controller.  I know I keep bringing it up, but you gotta understand – I hated the Dualshock 3 almost as much as I loved the Xbox360 controller.  My only gripe is that I keep forgetting how the face buttons are configured, which means I usually fail the game’s quicktime events the first time around.  That aside, the game works just fine, especially where combat is concerned, and so now I am really getting excited for Uncharted 4.

*     *     *

As far as Operation Backlog is concerned, I have spent the last week or so slowly playing through XCOM Enemy Within, which feels a bit like a “remix” rather than a full expansion.

I am playing it on Easy, because I’m a grown-ass man and I can do whatever I want; but also because I’m still terribly intimidated by the game.  I try as hard as I can to not make any mistakes, because the game absolutely beats the shit out of you if you do, and so every mission is very stressful and tense and I’m kinda just creeping along, desperate to stay in cover, trying to remember which of my squad are holding the medkits just in case.

I have not gotten far enough into the game to get into the “Meld” business – I’ve only done the first 5 or 6 missions, and I’ve got quite a stockpile of the stuff, but I don’t think I’ve yet built the requisite facilities to work with it.  It may take some time, really, as my play sessions only tend to last for one mission (and then the requisite post-mission housekeeping).  I can only take so much stress, people.

Delayed Reactions: the PS4

My PS4 arrived yesterday afternoon, and I’ll be damned if I wasn’t as giddy as a small child on Christmas morning when it finally showed up.

And after getting it all set up (which took almost no time at all, surprisingly enough), and then downloading Resogun and playing around an hour’s worth of Assassin’s Creed 4 (again), I come away feeling two very specific emotions:  (a) relief that I’ve finally entered the new console generation, and (b) some disappointment that there’s not quite anything new and dazzling to play just yet.  Indeed, the next big title that I’m looking forward to is… the super-deluxe-pretty Tomb Raider release, which is a game that I do in fact like quite a bit but have already beaten twice.

It’s OK, though.  I can wait.  At least the console’s in place, set up and ready to go.

Getting back to that setting up – man, Sony’s really picked up the pace with the PS4’s download speeds!  The Day One patch (which I think was up to version 1.52 when I got to it last night) was somewhere around 300-400MB, and it downloaded and installed everything within 5 minutes.  (Whereas on the PS3, it might still be downloading.)  Netflix and Amazon both downloaded and installed seamlessly, too – and without the need for a verification/validation code, which I believe I needed for both the PS3 and the 360 apps.   I’m not telling you anything that you might already know – I’m just saying, it was shocking to see how fast everything was happening.

And along those same lines, playing/installing Assassin’s Creed 4 off the disc took almost no time at all, either.

I don’t really know what to say about AC4 at this point; I’m not really sure how much of it I plan on playing, being that I just finished spending 60+ hours with it.  It’s basically a time-filler until Tomb Raider and/or Battlefield 4 arrive from Gamefly.  That being said, it’s immediately clear to me that this is the ideal way of experiencing it; the frame rate is perfectly smooth, the graphics are simply astonishing (colors are vibrant (that water!), draw distance is vastly improved, textures are sharp and detailed, and don’t get me started on the foliage), and the difference between the PS4 version and my shitty PC version is night and day.  Playing through that first Abstergo sequence sealed the deal; those sequences nearly broke my PC in half, for whatever reason, and playing them filled me with dread; yet on the PS4, they were smooth as silk, rock-solid frame rate, everything working the way it’s supposed to.

Moreover, the PS4 controller really is quite good.  I’m still very accustomed to the 360 controller, of course, but the PS4 controller fixes pretty much every problem I had with the PS3 controller; it feels really good to hold, all the buttons are in the right place, the d-pad is absolutely perfect (at least as far as entering text is concerned; I suspect it may be trickier when it comes to, say, fighting games).  More to the point, a game like AC4 requires near-constant controller manipulation (i.e., the simple act of running requires two simultaneous button presses), and not once did my hands cramp up.  (This was a constant problem for me with the PS3.)

So, yeah; I’m a happy camper.  Now I just need new games.

(I haven’t forgotten about Broken Age, by the way; I just need more time with it.  I played the first 20 minutes of Shay’s story on Tuesday night, and obviously last night was devoted to the PS4.  I hear it’s around 4 hours or so; I’ll be aiming to finish it over the weekend, and I’ll write something up on Tuesday.  Not sure if I’m going to address the whole “embargo” kerfuffle, especially as DoubleFine themselves ended up backtracking on it.  I’ll do my best to keep my write-up spoiler-free, at any rate.)

Weekend recap: oh no you didn’t

Operation Backlog went a bit sideways this weekend.  I was hoping that my attempts at frugality and my desire to actually finish something I started would last longer than 2 weeks, but, well, here we are.

Let’s start with the Backlog itself:  I finally finished, at long last, Lego Marvel Super Heroes, which I’m not sure I ever want to play again.  It started out quite well, as I recall, but towards the end it became endlessly frustrating – controls being flat-out unresponsive, boss battles with game-stopping bugs and/or glitches so bad I had to quit to desktop, cheesy dialogue that often doesn’t make any literal sense, puzzles with absolutely no context, or hints, or even an acknowledgement that the thing you need to do to enter the next room is to solve a puzzle; plus, after 12 hours of play, I’m only 20% complete.  I’m not enough of a Marvel geek to appreciate how deep the roster is and to soak in all the fan service; nor am I interested in slogging through each of those levels at least twice in order to find all the hidden bullshit.  I may very well be done with the Lego games, I think – at least until the kid is old enough to start playing them, and when that day comes they’d damn well better start shipping these things in a shape that actually works.

Still; it’s off the list.

The first bit of news that would put the Backlog project on hold was that DoubleFine’s Broken Age was entering Early Access on Steam this coming Tuesday.  I’d backed the Kickstarter (like everybody else in the Western Hemisphere above a certain age) but deliberately stayed away from the forums and the videos and such; I didn’t want anything spoiled.  Assuming I get the code, I will start downloading that IMMEDIATELY…

…except that the second bit of news that might even put Broken Age on hold is that…. um… I was finally able to buy a Playstation 4.  After a month or so of tracking its in-stock status on Now In Stock and getting shut out each and every time, I was actually able to get a PS4 into my Amazon cart without it disappearing on me… and so I finally pulled the trigger.  It’s scheduled for arrival on Wednesday.

Coincidentally, I was able to play a PS4 for the first time over the weekend, too; we were at the lovely home of my wife’s childhood friend, and at one point the husband took me upstairs to his game room, put his PS4 controller in my hand, and fired up Assassin’s Creed 4.  The difference between the PS4 and my old-ish PC is pretty staggering – as I expected it might be, but still.  Wow.  Right from that first island, the level of detail on the PS4 is jaw-dropping – the foliage, the depth of the water, the vibrant colors of the leaves, the textures of tree bark.  It’s still the same game, of course, but I’m kinda tempted to rent it and play a little bit more – I’d love to see the modern-day stuff moving at more than 5 frames per second, and I’d also love to see some of the towns, cities, and ports; hell, I wouldn’t mind seeing what the ship battles look like, especially during thunderstorms.

I also played just enough of Resogun to make sure I remind myself to download it as soon as I finish plugging the PS4 in.  Also, in perhaps the biggest surprise of all, I played enough of Battlefield 4 to actually consider renting it and maybe even play it online with people.

Speaking of which – if you’re reading this and we’re not already PSN friends, feel free to send me a friend request: I’m JervoNYC.

Uninformed Opinion: the Steam Machine

It was rumored that Valve would reveal their plans for the Steam Machine at this year’s CES, and, lo and behold, those rumors were correct.  Polygon has a full run-down of the third party manufacturers, and their respective Machines, right here.

As I look over that rundown, I find it increasingly difficult to know what to think about all this, because the difference between what I thought a Steam Machine would be, and what it apparently is, is so vast that I fear that I might have had the wrong idea from the very beginning.

What I thought we were getting was something meant to compete – not necessarily in ideology, but at least for literal, physical entertainment-center space – with the PS4 and the XB1; a console-sized box for the living room, competitively priced, that would allow me to hold on to my vast Steam library and play new titles with good, shiny tech.

You know what – while I was writing this out, Polygon’s Ben Kuchera basically took the words right out of my mouth.  I’m glad I’m not the only one having this problem:

It’s easy to describe the platonic ideal of what a Steam Machine should be. It should be shaped like a console and offer the same ease of setup and use. It should be able to offer roughly the same amount of power as a PlayStation 4, while costing around $500.

I don’t just want to play Battlefield 4 at the fidelity the PlayStation 4 offers, I also want to be able to try early access PC hits like Starbound, as well as something as niche as the latest Twine game on a fully-functional browser. These systems should play every game available on Steam, with no exceptions, and do everything a standard computer can do in a form factor and price that puts pressure on consoles.

What we have instead are 13 vastly different machines, ranging in price from $400 to $6000, with tech specs that are pretty much all over the place.  Furthermore, it’s now very unclear to me what the advantage of this machine is.   Again, as Ben says:

SteamOS itself, and this fact was somewhat glossed over during the press conference, is based on Linux, and only a percentage of the current Steam library is currently compatible. Why would you buy an able gaming PC only to take away a good chunk of your game selection and functionality by installing a gaming-specific OS?

It’s not a rhetorical question.[…] Newell may brag about the 65 million users Steam enjoys, but many of the games that brought those players to the platform won’t run on SteamOS unless Linux compatibility is added by the developer. Which won’t happen until the market is bigger. Which won’t happen until more games are added. You see the issue.

Jessica Conditt, in her Joystiq editorial, further addresses the sudden overcrowding of the Steam Machine market, without a clear “ideal” with which to base anything on:

“The consumer’s going to look at this landscape and ask, ‘What’s the difference?’ and, ‘Why? Why should I even buy a Steam Box?'” Nguyen said.

He offered an answer, suggesting Valve pick or make one box to be the ultimate Steam Machine, the epitome of what a Steam Machine should be, and market it as such. Give the customer an easy, obvious choice. It’s exactly what Google did with the Nexus phone to clarify the overcrowded Android market.

“They just totally disagreed with that,” Nguyen said. “They very much disagreed.”

Valve envisions a future of openness – open living rooms and open PCs and open code – and that’s a beautiful idea. Or it’s a junk pile. I’m sure Valve believes in what the Steam Machines can be, but the fact that it hasn’t thrown its own hardware into the ring to me demonstrates a lack of confidence in the idea, or at the least a lack of clarity.  (emphasis added)

That last bit is key, for me.  The fact that Valve itself is holding back – at least for the time being – sends an incredibly vague message, and it certainly doesn’t do the concept of the Steam Machine any favors.

At this point, the Steam Machine makes no compelling argument for me to wait.  Indeed, if anything it’s given me more of an incentive to get a better graphics card and leave it at that, and get a PS4 when they finally come back in stock.

 

2014: the year of the empty wallet

I spent the last day of 2013 at home with a horrendous stomach virus.  I’ve had stomach problems for most of my life, but this was something else entirely; this was the sort of thing where I was wondering if I needed to go to a hospital, while also wondering if I could even manage to leave the apartment for the 5 minutes it would take to get Gatorade and ginger ale at the shitty bodega across the street.  We’d made arrangements for my in-laws to be babysitting that day anyway, so at least the baby wasn’t completely neglected, but MAN.  Not the best way to spend the day.  I was in bed on New Year’s Eve at 8:30.

Like I said in my previous post, I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions.  I have objectives, I have plans, but “resolutions” seem silly and doomed to failure.  I’d mentioned that one of my goals this year was to conquer my 2013 backlog, and I briefly mentioned the financial considerations of that goal – that is, it’s silly for me to spend money on new games when I’ve already spent money on older games that I haven’t finished, or even started.

There’s another benefit to that angle, too:  the longer I can hold off on a new game, the better chance there’ll be that I can pick it up in a Steam sale.  And frankly, it’s been a long time since a Steam sale came around that actually meant anything to me.  I bought almost nothing during this most recent sale, and the stuff I did pick up was bought with a $20 gift card, so I didn’t actually spend any “real” money; and I bought them mostly for the sake of buying them, and not out of any real need.  And meanwhile, all these amazing AAA games were being sold at ludicrous prices, and… well… I’d already bought them at full price.

If 2014 is to be a year of more mindful spending, then it would behoove me to stick to this backlog strategy; this way, I can eventually pick up the stuff I’m looking forward to without having to pay full price for it.  This is hard for me, of course, because I’m an idiot with incredibly poor impulse control (and, also, I like to keep this blog somewhat timely and relevant), but I also have a baby now, and if ever there was a time for me to get my shit together, this would be the time.

The other part of this strategy, though, is:  I’m going to sell every Steam trading card that comes my way the moment I get it.

Before writing this post, I made the decision to go through my Steam inventory and sell all the trading cards I had.  And before I’d even finished unloading everything, I’d already made $2.50.  (I’m up to $3.76 right now; I think that covers everything I put out there.)  If I can keep getting card drops from my backlog – ~ $0.10 – $0.20 a card, 4-5 cards per game, 27 games (give or take, considering that I sold some cards from games in that backlog) – I mean, it’s not much, but it’s free money.  I could conceivably buy Terraria right now with the money in my account and still have change left over.  It’s certainly as good an incentive as any to go through that backlog as thoroughly as possible, right?

Of course, the wife and I did just start watching Breaking Bad last night, so I guess this backlog quest will be put on hold for at least a little while longer.

 

a slight change of plans

Sorry for the recent radio silence here.  The day job has been absurdly busy and time-consuming this week, and my evenings have been busy with work, social events and non-gaming-related activities, and the small amount of remaining time I’ve had to carve out for games-relating writing has been strictly focused on the upcoming Year In Games 2013 post.

Speaking of which, I’m nearly 2200 words into that post, but now, suddenly, I have to put it on pause for a little bit.  I recently came into an Amazon gift card, and just this morning I happened to see that Amazon has the PC download (i.e., Steam-able) version of Batman Arkham Origins available for 40% off.  I’d been waiting for a Steam sale to pick it up, but it hasn’t been discounted there at all this year – and meanwhile I think this is the second time Amazon had it on sale.  In any event, the gift card meant that I didn’t have to pay for it anyway, so it’s now currently downloading on my home PC.

Of all the notable games of 2013 that I had not played, BAO was the one that I’d most hoped I’d get to.  (Is that the second most-awkward sentence I’ve written this year?  Not sure anything beats the first paragraph of this post.)  The two previous Batman games are among my favorites of the entire console generation, and even though I know that this newest entry is (a) not developed by Rocksteady, (b) apparently pretty buggy, especially on the PC, and (c) probably not going to bust into my Top 10 (if the general review-scape is any indication), I’m still kinda jonesing to play it.

So, then, that’s the plan for this weekend during baby nap-times: to finish as much as I can of BAO, maybe try to squeeze in a bit more of Zelda 3DS, and also get the apartment ready for hosting Christmas next week.  And so the GOTY post will have to wait just a bit longer.

Also: pretty much everything on iOS is on sale right now, and so if you have some room on your iOS device, you should get busy.  Angry Birds Star Wars II is currently free.  I picked up the Deus Ex game for iPad this morning for 99 cents, and I think I might get KOTOR when I get home ($5, down from $10).

Also also:  The Room Two is fan-fucking-tastic.

Also also also:  While the control scheme is a bit wonky, I still find it amazing that I have GTA: San Andreas on my fucking iPhone.

Also also also also:  Halfbrick (who made Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja, among others) have a new game out today, and it’s called Colassatron, and it’s pretty rad.

stepping away from the ledge

I came this close to buying a PS4 yesterday.  Amazon suddenly had them in stock yesterday afternoon, and I got as far as having one sitting in my cart and getting it scheduled for Saturday delivery, before ultimately bailing on it.  In fact, I did this twice.  But each time I sat there with my mouse hovering over the CONFIRM button, I found that I couldn’t pull the trigger.

Here’s the thing that I had to repeatedly remind myself of – there’s almost nothing in the launch lineup that I need to play.  There’s only 2 games for the PS4 that I’d even consider buying right now, and the thing is, I’d just spent 60 hours playing one of them (Assassin’s Creed 4) on my PC.  And while I’m intrigued by Need For Speed Rivals, it’s not the sort of intrigue that’s worth spending over $460 on.  The rest of the PS4 launch lineup doesn’t really interest me all that much – I suppose I’d like to see Battlefield 4, but I’d rather see it when it isn’t completely broken.  And I can pass on the sports titles.

Xbox Ones have been much easier to find – on Amazon, at least – and I suppose I’m kinda interested in Forza (microtransactions notwithstanding) and Dead Rising 3 (even if I’m not really a big fan of that franchise).  And I’ve heard enough decent things about Ryse to make it worth checking out.  But the rest of the XBO baggage (like the Kinect and the buggy dashboard) is what’s keeping me away, and in any event I’m still finding myself wanting to dive into GTA V Online every so often – or, at least, I want the option available – so I don’t necessarily want to disconnect my 360.

But I’m also in this weird, post-AC4 period where I’m wanting to play new stuff, even as I have a huge backlog of stuff I haven’t finished.  Indeed, I’ve been stuck all week in this paralytic state where I just stare at my Steam library and don’t actually play anything.  That backlog, incidentally, includes quality stuff like:

  • Legend of Zelda: Link Between Worlds
  • Shadow Warrior
  • Antichamber
  • Rayman Legends
  • Lego Marvel
  • The Swapper
  • Kentucky Route Zero
  • FC3: Blood Dragon
  • Dishonored DLC
  • Mass Effect 3 – The Citadel DLC

*sigh*

In the meantime, GTA San Andreas is currently loading on my iPad, and The Room 2 is already there, so I can maybe calm down with the next-gen consoles for the time being.

Also also, I’m hoping to have the Best of 2013 post up some time next week.  In addition, I think I’m going to be involved in the voting process for the NYVCC awards, which will mark the first time I’ve gotten to deliberate with peers (or, rather, people that I’d like to consider me as a peer one day), as opposed to the usual howling into the void that happens here.  In any event, keep your eyes peeled.